I have to admit I was reluctant initially to embrace eBooks as my medium of choice for feeding my reading habit. I felt that I had to have the physical product – a printed book – in my hands, turning the pages. But, as I’ve indicted before, space constraints brought the message home: I could no longer keep buying books to line my shelves; I had run out of space. Because I’ve reached an age where I have a strong desire to simplify my life, I’ve had to lovingly “dispose” of many books. Yet reading is a huge part of my life, so I’ve had to adapt and learn to love eBooks. And adapted I have!
As someone who toiled for more than twenty years as a lab technician for a commercial photography studio, I know the effect that the digital age can have on an industry. While it didn’t happen overnight, the change from film, chemicals, and paper to digital imaging advanced rapidly, until I saw my job change completely before my eyes. It was adapt or die.
It’s apparent, though, that there are still some holdouts that are less than enthusiastic about the advent of the eBook age. In fact, some people are downright emotional – even melodramatic – about what they see as the detrimental effect of electronic books on the love of reading.
In “Ebooks will make authors soulless, just like their product,” author Andrew Keen laments the loss of “textual products” as they are replaced by their digital alternatives:
The traditional book is the most physical of things, a text to be bent and fingered and written on and imprinted with human signatures. Something to be physically loved. The ebook revolution changes all that. In the new digital age, readers and writers and publishers will increasingly come to reflect their soulless product.
As a book author, Keen says he wants his work to “be fingered by my readers.” But readers don’t form an emotional connection to an inanimate object like a book. It’s the content that matters; the author’s words and use of language are what connects him or her to the reader. The information is primary; the vehicle for distributing the information, secondary.
It’s not only individual readers and authors who are resisting the eBook trend. The bricks and mortar bookstores are being dragged reluctantly into the digital age. While eBook sales still represent a small portion of all book sales – second only to hardcover sales – eBook sales are on the increase. In fact, market analysts are predicting both the doubling of eBook sales next year and the eventual end of the bookstore as we know it.
Besides the space savings, eBooks offer other benefits to consider:
- lower costs to both the publishers and the readers
- “green” benefits from saving both trees and the energy it takes to produce and ship physical books
- the portability that allows readers to take a large selection of “books” with them wherever they go
To me, it seems elitist to reject a medium that can make books more readily available to the masses in order to share the information they contain. Perhaps some people just need a little more time to adapt before embracing the eBook trend.
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